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The Gods of the Copybook Headings: A fresh take on ancient truths
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Gerard Van der Leun
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
Comments on this entry are closed.
I dont understand the reference to “Copybook Headings”
Anonymous would be me; I’m not ashamed of my ignorance of Victorian era arcana
Schoolchildren used to practice writing by copying sentences in a copybook. Usually, in Kipling’s day, the sentences were well-known proverbs, Psalms, or the like. There’s an example of a copybook page at 0:22 in the above video.
“No! I’m not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you, I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?”
Thank you so much, Julie. It would be the equivalent of Catechism class for Catholic kids. And a whole lot of Catholics would be fitting subjects for poem/essay.
They “outgrew” their Catholic grounding, in the same way some Brits outgrew the wisdom found in their copybooks. .And what was the result …
I get it now, I really do.
C. S. Lewis wrote about modern, wretched British education in one of his Narnia books, from the 1950s. My own public school education was the squalid remnants in the barrel of modern education. Over the last decade, for me, it has been a pleasure reading manly, Christian poetry.
I suspect it’s time for Recessional to be updated as well for the present day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBra_BjJQY
One good memorable verse deserves another.
https://youtu.be/cOGHCzuinBw
ErisGuy. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the greatest novels ever written both for substance and style.